By Dillon Burroughs
A former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counterterrorism chief criticized law enforcement’s response to the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, as a failure.
Former DHS counterterrorism chief John Cohen shared the remarks during an interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“John, it was a failure,” Cohen began. “I’ve been in law enforcement almost 40 years. I’m proud of my profession. I respect the men and women who are out there each day trying to make our communities safe, but at the end of the day, we had 21 people die. We had 19 children die. We had people potentially die while law enforcement was on the scene,” he said.
Cohen also cautioned that more information will come out that will determine factors that could have been better addressed. However, the end result was a tragedy that ended the lives of 19 children and two teachers at the hands of a single shooter.
“We’ll learn more in the days ahead about whether they were properly equipped and whether they were properly trained, whether the incident command system worked as it should, whether the incident commander made the right decisions, whether there were communication issues or information sharing issues, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t change the outcome.